Why Money Can't Buy An Election

Obama and Romney in the final presidential debate in Florida on October 22.The courtship was dazzling but the marriage was pedestrian. He didn't break our hearts, exactly, but when it came time to renew our vows, we no longer burned with passion for him. In 2008, I did a reading along with a group of Indian writers including Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai, and Manil Suri to raise $85,000 for Barack Obama's election. This year, we stayed home.

In 2008, when I went out into the streets of New York the midnight of Obama's victory, everybody was dancing on the streets. This week, I watched the results on television with another group of writers who had dutifully voted for him; people were barely twitching.

That is because his first term disappointed the people who fought for him. He has deported more immigrants than any other president. He personally approves assassinations of people he considers to be terrorists, including American citizens-and does not consider it necessary to submit this death list for judicial review. The torture chambers of Guantanamo are still open, and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process remains comatose. He backed off on immigration, climate change legislation, gun control. He should have fought harder for the things he believed in, fought for them earlier in his term. He tried to compromise with a group of Congressmen who put ideology above the interests of the nation, and they almost drove him out of office. Almost.

For me, the most heartening realisation from this election was: Money can't buy you love, or an election. All the superpacs in the world couldn't give Romney the presidency or the Republicans the Senate. But it's still troubling. No other country spends as much on lobbying or elections. The presidential and congressional elections cost $6 billion. The vast majority of this money is cash that corporations and their owners put into campaigns for politicians that will do their bidding. In a healthy democracy, corporations as well as people are allowed to petition their legislators on matters that concern them. The First Amendment guarantees this freedom of speech. But there is no real freedom of speech when one side can buy a megaphone and the other side has to shout into the wind till they're hoarse.

The biggest consequence of Obama's victory is that the Supreme Court won't become an extension of the Republican Party, as it would have if one more Republican-appointed justice had joined the court's five-vote conservative majority. It will not overturn Roe vs Wade, the decision legalising abortion, or take another crack at throwing out Obama's healthcare legislation. The court is safe for four more years-and maybe longer, depending on when Republicans finally start taking Spanish lessons.

The Republicans are currently the party of 'angry white guys', in the words of one of their own senators, in a country in which the majority of babies born this year are non-white. You can hear them raging right now on Fox News and talk radio. I went to high school with these angry white guys, in Jackson Heights, Queens, when I first got to the country in 1977. On my second day, an angry white boy came up to me and said, "Lincoln should never let 'em off the plantations." I was teased and bullied, because I wasn't white; I was in the vanguard of the demographic shifts to come in Jackson Heights, now the most diverse neighbourhood in the USA. But if you go to this school now, you'll find that it's full of South Asians and Latinos; we won through sheer force of numbers. As we did, this week, in the country as a whole.

If I really wanted to get ahead in American politics, I should join the Republican Party. At least, that's the message that Bobby (Piyush) Jindal and Nikki (Nimrata) Haley, both Republican governors, might have for their fellow desis. No Indians have comparable positions in the Democratic Party, even though 70 per cent of Indian-Americans voted for Obama. The Republicans are looking high and low for qualified minorities that they might present as the new face of the party (even as the brain, heart, torso, and limbs remain lily-white).

Obama's re-election ran counter to the wishes of 57 million Americans-almost half the electorate. Many of them are indeed angry-angry at their own marginalisation at home; angry that they earn less than their parents; angry that their country no longer dominates the twenty-first century as it did the twentieth. But at the same time, only 5 per cent of voters cited foreign policy as the issue most important to them. Neither of the candidates spent any time talking about India-or Latin America, or Australia, or most of the world except the Middle East and, occasionally, China. In his second term, Obama will have to make the country come to terms with the dismal reality that the age of American exceptionalism is over. It's still a great country, but it's not the only great country.

The president still has time, now that we've pledged our love for him all over again, to make our hearts race again. He could take on the plutocrats who're robbing the country blind; he could stand up for the rights he taught as a Constitutional law professor; he could increase America's standing, and yes, power, in the world by making it admired again for its principles from Cairo to Caracas. He can take the lead in negotiating a new treaty on global warming and push it through Congress, taking on the oil companies and their lobbyists, becauseâ€”as Hurricane Sandy's devastation all around me so savagely demonstratesâ€”our very survival depends on it. He doesn't have to run for re-election ever again; he can now be bolder, in deed as well as in thought. And then he'll be our hearth-throb again; he will be the change we can believe in.

- Suketu Mehta, a writer based in New York, is the author of the acclaimed book Maximum City.